Turtle Is a Rendering Plugin for Maya Made by Illuminate Labs

Turtle Evaluation

Turtle is a rendering plugin for Maya made by Illuminate Labs .

Features

Turtle Render Overview

• Lua script shaders

• Anti-aliasing with advanced edge tracing

• Final Gather and Global Illumination

• Ambient and Reflection Occlusion

• HDRI and Image Based Lighting

• Micropolygon displacement at render-time

• Render polymeshes as subdivision surfaces

• Direct compatibility with ZBrush displacement and normal maps

• Environment Map Camera

• Output shaders

• Realistic material shaders (eg. Oren Nayar)

• Fast subsurface scattering with support for blocking geometries

• Advanced pass system - any shader can be a separate pass

Turtle Baking Overview

• Renderview Baking

• Adaptive Super Sampling

• Bake Region

• Preview Baking

• Surface Transfer

• Normal Maps

• Polynomial Texture Maps

• Batch Baking

• Bake Layers

• Stencil Baking

• Adaptive Texture Resolution

Network rendering

Turtle is supported by all major distributed network-rendering packages.

Platforms

• Windows 2000/XP for Maya

Maya 6.5 and Maya 7

• Linux for Maya 6.5 and

Maya 7

• Mac OS X for Maya 6.5

and Maya 7

Features Tested

Findings

The first test was to determine the accuracy of the scene renderer. The scene used in the example below is a cube with glossy white surfaces with one Red, one Green and one Blue wall. The spheres are a silver ball bearing and a white cue ball. There is but a single light source. Overall, the Mental Ray render produced a superior render using default settings, but Turtle possesses many tweakable parameters including photon emission that allows accurate renders of caustics and subsurface scattering.

Rendered using Mental Ray, final gather.

Rendered using Turtle, Global illumination with super sampling.

The next test was to determine the accuracy of the surface mapping tools available in Turtle. I tested both Combined Color and Light Maps, Illumination Maps.

Below are the Combined color and illumination map for the Cube holding the spheres in the scene. UVs are overlaid in the image.

Turtle – note opposite faces litMental Ray

Above, the illumination maps and color maps are re-assigned to the Cube holding the spheres in the scene.

Surface Transfer

Turtle’s surface transfer rendering delivers. My first pass contained artifacts, but after massaging the thresholds a bit, the results were quite good:

Surface Transfer

Other features were of some interest but most really had little to contribute to our production pipeline. One thing of interest was Turtle’s ability to output LUA script shaders, which would be of interest if we decide to pursue dynamic radiosity maps, dynamic environment maps or dynamic soft shadowing in future projects.

Pricing

The retail price of Turtle 3 is 1,399 USD per workstation license. During March and April Turtle 3 will be priced at 1,199 USD for workstations as an introductory discount.

Turtle pricing

Workstation (with GUI):

License1,199 USD/machine

Upgrade499 USD/machine

Render-farm (without GUI):

License399 - 999 USD/machine (volume based pricing)

Upgrade199 USD/machine

Recommendations

Turtle is not cheap, but it certainly delivers. The question really boils down to whether it pays for itself over the span of our development cycle. A mid-level artist earning 50K costs the company $2,000 in base salary every two weeks (excluding benefits). If turtle saves the artist 2 weeks of labor, then you break even. Since the lightmap utility would be used by most artists in the art department, I hardly see this software as a good solution. I recommend we pass and use the following alternatives below:

Melody – Melody is a free utility for surface transfer maps.

Mental Ray – Mental Ray is a free utility included with Maya that produces exceptional Light maps.

Mental ray Lightmap

Nebula 2 Toolkit for Maya 7.0 - $390 USD (320 EUR).

* work with any number of Nebula2 projects in parallel

* work on large projects with hundreds or thousands of graphics objects and textures

* access all Nebula2 features from within Maya

* preview your high-poly Maya scene in Nebula2 usually in under 3 seconds

* assign DX9 HLSL shaders per-shape or per-face

* batch-export your textures and graphics objects with command line tools

* preview and export any of the following from within Maya:

o static scenes

o hierarchically animated scenes

o smooth-skinned, animated characters

o particle systems

o blend shapes

o shadow geometry for stencil buffer shadows

o collide geometry

o lightmapped scenes

* a custom Material Editor lets you control the shader attributes of your DX9 HLSL shader library

* Script Injection lets you insert your own script fragments into the exported Nebula2 object hierarchy

* a custom For Each dialog lets you batch-execute MEL scripts on all or any of your Maya scene files

* Hierarchy Nodes insert forced hierarchy points into your exported Nebula2 object hierarchy which can be controlled at runtime by the application

* automatic scene optimization during export rearranges the exported geometry into the most optimal format for rendering in Nebula2

* automatic tangent generation creates per-vertex-tangents needed for per-pixel-lighting

* automatic texture conversion converts and compresses your texture files to DDS when needed

* One Click Lightmapping reduces the complete Maya lightmapping workflow to a few simple steps

* Mental Ray Lightmapping lets you use Mental Ray to render your lightmaps for features like Global Illumination, Final Gather or Image Based HDR Lighting

* Paint On Lightmaps lets you use the builtin Maya realtime 3D paint to retouch your lightmaps.

* a Texture Conversion Table allows you to fine-tune how textures should be converted to DDS (rescaling, mipmap generation, etc.)

* easy integration of project specific mel scripts in an own Maya menu